Washington - The private US security firm Blackwater, under investigation in Iraq and the US for killing at least 10 Iraqis earlier this month, has a far higher rate of shooting than other security firms in Iraq, The New York Times reported Thursday. The story quoted unnamed officials familiar with internal State Department reports as saying that Blackwater's incident rate was at least twice that of two other US firms, DynCorp International and Triple Canopy.
The only statistics quoted by the Times were those of DynCorp. The State Department records incident reports every time guns are fired in protecting its diplomats, but has not made the information public.
The firms are deployed to protect diplomats in Iraq. In the September 16 incident, Blackwater guards are charged with killing 10 people in the western suburb of Mansur.
US President George W Bush last week pledged a full investigation of the incidents in a joint US-Iraqi inquiry. Defence Secretary Robert Gates has sent an investigating team to Iraq, and the Iraqi government has widened its investigation into Blackwater's operations.
The US-based security company says it traded fire with armed insurgents who attacked a diplomat convoy. Iraq's government says the dead were innocent civilians.
In the other incidents being probed, another 10 Iraqis were left dead, according to the Times and a report last week by the Washington Post.
The US government and private companies hire the firms to guard diplomats, contractors, reconstruction worksites and even cash.
The companies employ former US military special operations soldiers to carry out the contracts.
They are specifically trained to guard convoys and handle small rapid fire situations, and possess skills regular soldiers usually do not, John Pike, an analyst at Globalsecurity.org, a think tank outside Washington, told Deutsche Presse-Agentur
